by Amber Burns
“What the…”
Rowan rolled the iPhone in his large, rough hands, stunned at having found it in the middle of the forest. He stared hard at it for a moment before tapping at its screen with his index finger. The date and time leaped into view. He stood holding the phone in the palm of his calloused hand for one moment longer. Then he slid it into his pocket and turned his attention back to his search.
The weight of the phone in the pocket of his jeans felt foreign and odd, but Rowan refused to let it distract him from the task at hand. Taking a deep breath, he filled his lungs with the familiar refreshment of clean country air. Then he turned back to the trail, taking several moments to retrace his steps so that he arrived back at the location he had been standing when he had last heard the sounds of crying bouncing through the trees.
He took a few steps, and then stopped very suddenly. He froze, becoming as still and solid as the trees around him. He stared straight ahead, not a single muscle on his toned body moving. There, a few feet before him, sitting several paces in front of a large outcropping of silvery gray rock, was a girl. Her back was to him so that all he could see was the long hair that tumbled down her neck and past her shoulders. As he took a silent step forward, his heart leaped into his throat, and it took every inch of restraint he possessed in order to stopper a gasp from escaping his lips. For as he had taken that single step forward, the moon had slid its way through a gap in the tangled forest ceiling and flashed itself across the girl’s head. And Rowan had noticed that the girl wore a gleaming mane of bright fiery hair.
“The woman of fire,” he whispered to himself.
“Well yeah,” the girl was saying to herself, her voice flat and tired. “We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere.”
Rowan stood to his full height and dropped his gun slightly to his side.
“The middle of fucking nowhere,” he said in his deep, earthy voice. It was a voice that truly matched the forest. “Poetic. We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere, sure is beautiful, isn’t it?”
The girl spun around so suddenly that Rowan was afraid she might fall over. She raised a rock high in the air and reared her arm back as if she aimed to smash Rowan in the face. Like lightning, his own arm shot up to grab the rock from her hands. The rock was sailing through the air to land seemingly several miles away before the girl even realized what had happened. She stared, pretty pink lips hanging open in shock, as Rowan brushed his hands off on his pants and cleared his throat.
It was then, standing about three inches away from the stranger’s face, that Rowan realized he had no idea what to say. He had not spoken to another human for over a year, and the beauty of this girl, her hair like the flames that had danced for him just only the night before, completely overwhelmed him. Dirt streaked her pale face, lining her cheekbones and clinging to her neck. Her hair was tangled, and dead leaves clung to the golden ends, rustling slightly as the wind played over her body. Her breasts heaved up and down, her breath rushing in and out of her perfectly shaped lips, flushing her cheeks the color of freshly bloomed rose petals. It was all he could do not to reach out a tattooed hand and brush the mud from beneath her eyes.
“You lost?”
Those were the words he found himself saying to this girl who had shown up at the heart of the forest. She stared back at him as if she had not heard the words at all, her breasts still heaving up and down in such a way that Rowan found it difficult to concentrate on her green eyes, though they sparkled with a sort of light that Rowan swore was made of the stars themselves. He cleared his throat, forcing himself to remain smart. He did not do this, he did not feel this way about people, ever; he was independent, strong willed, and had never felt distracted since first calling the forest his home. He blinked rapidly, filled his nostrils with the sharp, cool air and felt some of his normal aptitude and focus returning to him.
“You lost?” he repeated, and it seemed as if his words caused the red headed stranger to suddenly jump back to life.
She choked on her heaving breaths and coughed violently, sputtering back into the moment. Her face instantly clouded over with an anger so sharp that Rowan felt it stabbing him like a knife, flying out of the center of her electric green irises. She opened her mouth, then slapped it shut again, then opened it again, her fists clenching into small, hard ball at her hips.
“Who the fuck are you to ask me anything.”
It was not a question. Her words shot out of her mouth like punches. But Rowan was not alarmed. He slid his gun into his holster and slowly crossed his arms across his chest. His biceps pressed against his abdomen, hard and sculpted.
“I am the man who has run for an hour, responding to screams he heard echoing through the forest,” he replied, his voice steady and solid as the rock that stood behind them. “I am the man who is holding a gun, and I am the only person around for miles and miles and miles.
The girl met his stare with fiery defiance.
“And you,” Rowan continued. “Are the girl who seems quite lost, and quite alone. And you are missing a shoe,” he added, glancing down at her bare foot. “And the one shoe that you do have does not seem to be the type of gear appropriate for hiking the twelve hours it would take to get you back to the nearest side road.”
Rage danced behind the girl’s pupils.
“So,” Rowan said calmly. “Who the fuck am I to ask you anything? Let me answer that. I am your only chance of making it out of here alive. That is who I am to ask you anything. Of course, you don’t have to answer,” he continued, arching an eyebrow slightly. “Whether or not you choose to respond is entirely up to you. I don’t mind either way.” And with those words, Rowan turned his back to the girl and began to walk back towards the direction of his cabin.
“Okay wait,” the girls sputtered out behind him.
It had taken but five steps for her to respond. Rowan stopped walking but kept his back to the girl. He waited.
“Okay, wait, yes, I am lost, and yeah, I guess I need some help.”
Rowan breathed out quickly. He turned to face the stranger once again.
“I’m glad you decided to answer,” he said, looking at the girl. “Leaving you for dead out here wouldn’t have weighed well on my conscience.” And he turned his back to her again and began to walk through the overlaying shades of green and gray, back towards the spot in the woods that he called home.
Nina followed the strange dark man through the forest, trying to keep track of him amidst the shadows that tangled with the light. Following his trail proved more difficult than she originally expected; he was as dark and sturdy as the trees they walked past. She found it tricky, with her inexperienced eyes, to pick him out from the other forms that decorated the landscape of the forest at night. She also found it difficult to concentrate on anything but his body. When the moon flashed through the trees, it caught pieces of this stranger, this man. She saw flashes of the shape of his bare arms, working to push branches out of the way; the form of his waist, swaying back and forth, squeezing through narrow pathways between trees, curving paths for Nina to follow; the flinching of his ass, purely muscle. She tried to not to take him in, but her green eyes would just not relent, leaping and relaxing, working his legs forward, ever forward, towards what, she did not know.
After about a half hour of silence, Nina cleared her throat.
“Hey,” she said tentatively to the figure carving his way through the darkness, to the man that led her path. “Hey!”
He did not respond.
She took a few more careful steps through the undergrowth, her right foot still fitted tightly into the precious stiletto, and stopped. She bent down quietly, her eyes still on the mysterious bearded man who walked the forest in front of her. She slipped her foot out of the shoe and lifted it above her head. Before she had the chance to second guess her instinct, she hurled the shoe forward towards him and succeeded in smacking him, hard, in the small of the back.
“Holy shit!” he cried, his voice breaking i
nto a higher register.
She was surprised to find herself giggling. Giggling, in this situation? The middle of an unknown landscape, following a potentially murderous stranger to who knows where, and I’m giggling? Nina shook her head, shaking away instinct, settling back into the comfortability of practiced suspicion, and learned privilege. She cleared her throat again.
“Ahem,” she coughed. The man finally halted his fast pace and turned to face her. In the very dim light, she was able to see an unimpressed sneer carving its way across his face. “Well,” she continued. “Now that I have got your attention…”
“You did more than get my attention,” he snarled back. “You effectively put a serious bruise on my back. What the hell was that?”
“That,” Nina said calmly, staring him in his black hole eyes. “Was a very expensive shoe. Which I shall shall want back just about now, thank you very much.” She stared at him expectantly.
The man stared back, completely uncomprehending. Then, a single eyebrow arched its way up his forehead, and he glanced at the place on the ground that Nina’s Louboutin stiletto lay. He glanced back at her. She slowly raised her hand, palm faced upward. He crouched and grabbed the red-soled shoe in his hand. He stood back up and held it up to her, staring her down with eyes filled with disgust.
Nina stared the stranger straight back, her face completely neutral, her eyes boring into his own. Her face maintained its emotionless, blank slate appearance as she forced him to continue to maintain her gaze. Yet inside of her, she was experiencing something completely different. While she kept her face blank and composed, her insides were another story altogether. Beneath her cool exterior, Nina was a roiling storm of emotion. Lightning bolts of electrical attraction flashed across her middle and made it difficult for her to concentrate on anything but the shape of this man’s muscles, his build, the way his well-carved abs pressed up against his thin shirt. The shadows playing across his tattooed flesh made her want to run her fingers across his foreign skin; she felt fire and color exploding within her mind, her breasts, and it was all she could do not to grin or perhaps scream while she continued to maintain his stare. She was not sure whether joy or fear was the correct response to the intensity she was experiencing in feeling his eyes on her own. So instead, she held fast to her sturdy neutral outer mask. She kept her hand steady and outstretched, and she maintained the intensity of her controlling gaze. She held him before her until she could no longer physically bear it; and then she released him by ripping the shoe from his grip and shoving her foot stubbornly back inside of the red-soled prison.
Nina did not break her eye contact with him as she shoved her foot back into the shoe. She let the shadow of a wince flash across her face as she felt the tight edges of the high heeled shoe smash against the blisters already decorating her foot. But she forced herself to stand up and continued to stare at the strange man. His own gaze began to twist slightly, became warped under the intensity of her own eyes. Finally, after what felt like an eternity of darkness and silence, she spoke.
“Well? Where the fuck are we going?”
The man stared at her still, for one moment longer. Then, without so much as a word or facial reaction, he turned and began to walk quickly forward again, as if their interaction had never occurred at all.
Nina stood rooted to the spot for a moment, staring in disbelief, mouth hanging open. How could he react like that after she had stared him down with such strength, fitted him with such sass? No man had ever before proven so immune to her powers of control, to her concentrated suggestion of action. The fact that this stranger had the nerve to completely ignore Nina’s rage made her even more enraged than she had been when she had first realized that she had become lost in the tangled paths of the forest. After a moment of standing frozen in shock, Nina jumped back to life and began dragging her blistered foot through the trees, following the stranger.
“You think you’ve won?” She found herself mumbling as she walked into tree after tree, her naive city girl eyes unaccustomed to the night time light, or lack thereof, of the forest. “Oh, fuck that. You have not even begun to taste the feeling of a fight, woodsman boy. Just you wait until you really get a taste of Nina!”
She must have spoken the last bit louder than she had intended, for the stranger turned around just then. In the light of the moon, Nina noticed that a twisted half-smile curved its way across his bearded face.
“Hmm,” he smirked, his eyes unreadable. “I have never been one to have just a taste.”
He turned his back to her again and continued to trudge forward at an impossibly quick pace, his agility and knowledge of the path so impressive that Nina swore he would be able to navigate this journey even if she were to somehow overcome his muscled form and punch both his eyes blind. Which was something she had definitely been concocting in her mind’s eye. For the more time she spent trailing this stranger through the darkened forest, the more she had begun to question his motives.
“So who are you anyway?” She heard herself say as she stubbornly dragged her stiletto over a particularly burdensome patch of muddy undergrowth.
She thought she heard him cough, but it may have been just the crunch of crisp leaves protesting being squashed by his heavy steel toed boots. He did not turn, did not so much as flinch. The strange man continued to walk onwards, putting ground behind him, pushing on blindly towards some destination Nina was no longer sure she truly wanted to discover.
“Who are you?” she found herself repeating, her voice slipping out of her lips more whiney and shivery than she had wanted it to.
She cleared her throat as the dark stranger began to carve the way up a steep incline in the path. The trees pressed in so closely that Nina had to shimmy sideways in order to fit her curvaceous form through the small slit of a path. It was so dark now that Nina could not even see the hill they climbed; she only knew they were climbing upwards because of the pull of the ground against her bare foot; because of the way her breath began to push and burn her stomach with effort. She toppled forward as her stiletto twisted in the grip of some unseen rock or stick, and in anger, she tore the shoe from her foot and hurled it again forward. But this time, there was a loud thwack followed by a scuffling sound, and then a yelp.
“OW!”
The man had tripped over the shoe and tumbled to his knees, sending himself scuttling down the steep incline. His heart raced as he gripped for something to grab ahold of, to stop his mad skitter down the incline, but found only dead leaves, slick with the night’s dewy darkness. His feet skittered, gaining speed with the lubrication of the shed leaves, and he found himself sliding unstoppably downward until he smacked directly into Nina. She grabbed him with more muscle than he had thought possible from such a skinny girl as her and she stopped his downward tumble.
Nina knew that this was her only chance. She stood perfectly still, listening to the slithering sound of his body tumbling down the hill. When the noise neared, she was ready to pounce, and she threw herself upon the stranger as he slid down the hill and into her path. She landed and thrashed at him wildly, digging her bare toes into the wet muck of the forest floor in order to gain traction and keep them from sliding further downwards. She drove her elbows, hard, into his chest, in order to prevent him from being able to fight her off. The result was a shocking success, even to her. She found herself panting and shivering slightly with adrenaline as she straddled this strange, dark man in the middle of a landscape that was even more of a dark stranger to her than the body she clenched beneath her.
She felt his breath, hot and quick, against her cheek and turned her face to face his own. Blinking rapidly, she felt her green eyes begin to find tiny bits of light within the vast darkness. A few moments passed and, as she gained her breath, his chest sliding her slightly up and down as he too struggled to again find the air to fill his lungs. Pieces of the night time scene began to edge into view. She saw, with heightened clarity, the lay of the hill stretching forever upwards, rimmed by tr
ees placed so close together that the pass made her feel sickeningly claustrophobic. She was able to pick out the gentle sway of individual leaves as they silently clung to life, gripping the branches of the trees that curled their bodies above. And, she realized, she was able to make out the shape of the man’s face. For it was no more than two inches, now, from her own.
His cheekbones were the first things that came into her vision. Sharp, like knives, the perfect match for a chiseled jawline that wore a beard so dark it blended into the night itself. His mouth hung open, framed by plump lips. As he struggled back and forth beneath her tight and stubborn hold, his shoulder length black hair whipped her gently in the face. Then, his eyes, black and glinting with the tiny slivers of moonlight that every now and then managed to flash through the trees. His body was pure muscle, and Nina could feel every fiber, taut and desperate, straining and pulsating under her own form. She straddled his abdomen, and she could feel each individual, perfectly carved muscle working beneath her ass. She swallowed, struggling to maintain her cool. She closed her eyes, reopened them. The night still hung dark and heavy. His breath still flushed her cheeks. She took a steadying breath through her nose and felt her anger and fear flutter to life again in the pit of her stomach. And she spoke.
